Beck: The Bible is Our Only Hope

Here’s another one of Glenn Beck’s ridiculous daily staff meeting videos as he shouts at his staff about how America is going to hell in a handbasket and the Bible is the only thing that can save us. I especially like the guy to his left trying to ignore the screed.

If the Bible is all he needs, why does he have those glasses over his eyes and that huge watch on his wrist?

Sastra

The belief that the US Constitution and the “western way of life” (democracy? science? human rights?) is rooted in the Bible is about as close to “sheer lunacy” as a popular idea can be. Saying it over and over again while literally thumping on a Bible doesn’t make it any more true.

It’s perfectly possible and certainly conceivable that someone could live a valuable, meaningful, happy “western” sort of life without ever reading the Bible or even knowing what it’s about. Beck like many people confuses the belief that God made everything that exists with the idea that everything that exists is therefore rationally ‘rooted’ in God.

Mr Beck has a point. The Bible got us into this mess, so surely it can get us out of it.

Kevin Kehres

He’s quite right. Why, just the other day, I was reading that passage in the bible about a bicameral legislature, three co-equal branches of government with a non-hereditary head of state, and with inviolable rights assigned to the people against the interests of the government itself…

Oh wait…there’s nothing like that at all in the bible.

http://atheist-faq.com Jasper of Maine

False: Obi wan Kenobi is our only hope

http://freethoughtblogs.com/axp/ Martin Wagner

The Bible is our only hope for what?

anubisprime

So if the wholly babble is the answer…errr!…wot’s the question again?

David C Brayton

Bipolar? Beck goes from ‘I’ve lost all hope for America’ to ‘America is even better than Jesus’ on a weekly basis.

Synfandel

@3 Satra wrote:

It’s perfectly possible and certainly conceivable that someone could live a valuable, meaningful, happy “western” sort of life without ever reading the Bible or even knowing what it’s about.

Apparently, it’s also perfectly possible that someone could be a Bible-thumping, theocratic bigot without ever reading the Bible or even knowing what it’s about.

mikeyb

Here’s a different take. In a very real way I agree with Beck that we are “spiraling out of control.” Your garden variety tea partier recognizes that things are seriously fucked up, but the right wing corporatocracy has succesfully directed that anger to the government. But the anger is misdirected and misguided. A lot of tea partiers are in a way the equivalent of the occupy movement in their recognition that things ain’t going so well to say the least. It is not the government that is the problem – it is corporate state capitalism which has lead to grotesque inequality, where corporations and the superrich own and control everything, and the 99% are increasingly serfs, if they are able to get a job at all, they barely can pay the bills. Since consumers are 70% of the economy, when consumers can no longer consume even essentials, the economy will inevitably collapse. Real unemployment is ~20% or so if you include all the people who aren’t looking for work anymore. I see inequality inevitably leading to another big recession/depression in the near future. In a way Beck is channeling a this right wing screed, that does reflect that things are seriously fucked up, and are leading to economic disaster. I don’t care that the stock market is at an all time high. Personal and private debt is at an all time high. Things are going to break big time, in the not too distant future. The Bible may be the only thing a lot of people own when everyone gets wiped out, but it ain’t no hope for anything.

eric

Real unemployment is ~20% or so if you include all the people who aren’t looking for work anymore.

If you’re talking about the US as a whole, I am deeply skeptical of that number.

eric

Real unemployment is ~20% or so if you include all the people who aren’t looking for work anymore.

If you’re talking about the US as a whole, I am deeply skeptical of that number.

Randomfactor

The Bible is our only hope for what?

Stopping progress in its tracks.

raven

Things are going to break big time, in the not too distant future.

1. What you say is true. Inequality has been increasing for 50 years and that trend isn’t stopping. Basic polysci says inequal societies become politically unstable. We are becoming unstable.

2. Thomas Piketty claims in his new book Capital in the 21st century that it is caused by our version of capitalism. His book just came out. It is now #1 on Amazon. com.

3. As to when things “break big time”. Who knows? We could go on this way for many more decades. The Romans knew how to do it. Bread and circuses. Today we have food stamps, marijuana, alcohol, and cable TV.

It’s likely to break a lot longer than we can imagine and the Boomers will likely be mostly dead.

Ironically, a favorite Tea Party target is the bread part, the social safety net and food stamps. If they manage to achieve their malevolent goals, it will break sooner. And their heads will be the ones mounted on the pikes when the peasants storm the castles.

raven

Things are going to break big time, in the not too distant future.

This is what Karl Marx got wrong.

His idea was that the proletariat was going to be inevitably ground down by capitalism And one day they would rise up.

That never really happened. Communism was instituted top down in an agrarian country, Russia, and spread mostly by the Russians conquering everything around them. The western countries mostly had peaceful evolutions to some sort of social democracies.

grumpyoldfart

From the video:

This has all the answers. It has all the answers

Just a shame that it’s not always the correct answer:

It is like a mustard seed, which is the smallest of all seeds on earth. (Mark 4:31)

Abdul Alhazred

Does this mean he’s not a Mormon any more?

Reptile Dysfunction

That, to me, is what Occupy Wall Street is addressing. People don’t know

exactly what they want, but as one friend of mine put it, they know one thing:

FUCK THIS SHIT! We want something different: a different life, with

different values, or at least a chance at different values.”

–Matt Taibi, from ‘How I stopped worrying & learned to love OWS’

[This article appeared in Rolling Stone in November of 2011]

felidae

Strange, all the purveyors of holy books say the same thing–that theirs has all the answers for mankind and nothing else is required and all these claims are equally horseshit

freehand

eric – from the link you provided: In the United States, the unemployment rate measures the number of people actively looking for a job as a percentage of the labour force.

.

Elsewhere: In March, 2.2 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, little changed from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. 6.)

.

So 2.2 million were not counted as unemployed even though they were looking for work. Those no longer looking for work, or looking but not through official channels, were not counted. And those who are under employed are not counted, i.e. my daughter, with a BS in anthropology and math, is a part-time cashier at a supermarket.

.

Yeah, I can believe that the real unemployment rate is at least 20%.

bushrat

@8 Jasper of Maine

False: Obi wan Kenobi is our only hope.

Do you mean Old Ben Kenobi that lives out beyond the Dune Sea?

sabrekgb

“Up is down!”

lol…he literally said that. Black shall now be white, and war shall be peace (which, sadly, it kinda is…) :/